Something for everyone

Press, 24 August 1988, Page 19

Something for everyone

Coca Cola took an informed punt when it sponsored television Two’s music week-end. Only when the ratings are published in a few weeks will we have the final picture of how many of us tuned in at some point in the 48 hours. Whatever the result, the well-designed promotion logo and sumptuous ads got plenty of airplay to wider audiences even before the two-day programme. Nevertheless 48 hours of music is a pretty epic enterprise when you consider the usual generalpurpose, something-for-everyone, cautious TV Two week-end schedule. Certainly someone believed that they could haul in enough of us with the right demographic credentials to make it worthwhile for advertisers. Coke’s international advertising experience must have helped make them secure in their decision. Satellite and cable broadcasters, including Mr Murdoch, , have proved that narrowcasting with an all-music station format makes marketing sense. It’s a winner in America and Europe. It reaches the audience which spends a mint on soft drinks, sweets, fast food, records and fashion. The week-end’s music

attracted similar advertisers here. Of course there was the stunning cinematography of the Coke ads. Other bonuses included being able to enjoy Geoff Dixon’s marvellous re-cut of the Europa trip around the West Coast and a clever new A.N.Z. Bank ad . which tried to put out the news that bankers can look just like the blokes in Coke ads.

So what were we offered in this mega-pro-gramme? Consensus among a group at polytech was that it offered a wide selection. There was something for everyone.

You Qieed the population of a New York to afford to be really specialised and audacious in taste and hope to keep your audience for two days. The occasion for this musical smorgasbord, the Nelson Mandela Birthday Concert, lost perform-ance-energy for me. The time shift gave it the feel of a late birthday card. There’s nothing quite like the ragged edge of live performance. In the end the concert felt so safe that I began to concentrate on the strange patterns that massed human beings make. Wembley Stadium full of people resembled a seabed of -waving seaanemones. Here was organic unity moving on currents of music. All angularity was smoothed out into mass rhythm. At about 8 a.m. Whitney Houston told this moving sea, “We love you out there.” Who? Mandela? One in all? All in one? Human love is easy in the general. It’s the specifics which are messy. Later, during the extended performance of “Dire Straits,” the camera-cuts grew positively ecstatic. At one stage we had images of the packed Wembley Stadium shot from the air and superimposed over images of Eric Clapton’s

guitar finger-work. This radically redefines the idea of long and close-up shots. Then we were given wonderful visual of spotlights playing on the night-time audience. And the beat kept on while the imageswitching played late-twentieth-century games with our sense of perspective. So it was interesting to catch up with “The Compleat Beatles” again. It showed clearly how many of the conventions of staging and filming rock music had been forged by the Beatles two decades or so ago. There were those shots from the first scary mass concerts where human behaviour took mass shapes. I’d forgotten how big they were and how much they spooked the authorities (and the Beatles). There was John Lennon a bit later, in the Sergeant Pepper period, intoning “Love, Love, Love” to the entire world during the first international direct broadcast where the rock greats gave their time free. Why does a mass broadcasting audience bring out the pious wish for universal love in artists who are usually more exercised by the wish to extol sexual energy?